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Office Monitoring/Blocking Software

sunny441

Posted 07 June 2007 - 10:01 PM

sunny441

Member

Member

258 posts

Hi guys:

Problem at the small business I work in. There are about 8 computers all over the shop - 2 PC's and 6 Mac's. Most of the time - the guys are chatting on Yahoo! messenger and other instant messaging. MySpace and other social networking sites like tagged are a big problem. Boss is not very happy these days.

he wants to know if there is any way he can monitor and keep an eye on the workers and also is there anyway of preventing or blocking these sites. We also want to make sure that no sensitive information (passwords, etc) fall into wrong hands. boss is not too computer savy - so the program will have to be a little more GUI based and for beginners. The problem is this - the shop is owned by the university and the internet connection is maintained by the IT department. So it will have something that is done locally.

So my question is this - are there any softwares that can be installed on each computer- where the boss can monitor what the workers are up to? Something like Net Support School software. Only we were wondering if there is anything along the lines of open source or free ware.

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ScHwErV

Posted 11 June 2007 - 12:29 PM

The free alternative is VNC (I prefer UltraVNC). He will need to be taught how to use it, but it is GUI based and easy to use once you figure out how to connect.

As far as messengers and what-not, why not go the prevention approach rather than the spy approach? Get a decent filtering software or use group policies or hosts file alterations to block the sites you want.

There is a good firewall called Dan's Guardian that many schools use. It's Linux based and free (or like $70 a year for updates). That way you can set up a blacklist of the sites you want to block. Just have everything from the office route through the firewall before hitting the main network.